ABSTRACT
The twists and turns of intellectual fashion are as unpredictable as the ways that conversations bounce from topic to topic. But even so, the archive? Who would have foreseen that a spot once so dry and dusty would become one of the hippest places around? What gave the archive its surprising celebrity? (For a large contextual answer, see Ernst, 2002 and Lovink 2003). The term “archive” has assumed a vastly expanded sense comparable to the earlier career of the term “text.” In the 1970s onward any “methodological field,” as Roland Barthes said, could be a “text”; more recently, almost any collection of documents or evidence has become an “archive.” (When my graduate students discuss their seminar papers, they routinely refer to the materials they have gathered as their “archive” whether they are talking about Chinese novels from the 1930s, technical manuals for nonlinear video production, or experimental films from the 1970s; their notion of archive lacks any sense of institutional sponsorship or specific location). The inflation of the notion of text probably owed as much to the video recorder (Paech, 2010) as the inflation of the archive owes to digital technologies: documenting devices, cheap storage, user-generated content, and the Internet are clearly one precondition for the great career of the archive today. We live in perhaps the most archive-friendly moment in history; thanks to the great “finding-aid” of Google among other search engines, along with enormous professional and amateur efforts, we have mushrooming digital compilations and ready access to documents of many flavors in unprecedented abundance.
